At Hove on June 30th this year, Stuart Law reached his century against Sussex and became the 34th man to score a hundred hundreds.
Ramps? Oh, he did that ages ago. April 2007, to be precise, against Yorkshire. His current total is 114 centuries: 100 in first-class cricket, and 14 in one-day.
Writers and commentators have been quick to point out that Mark Ramprakash might be the last man to reach 100 hundreds. Usually they’ve done so in a tone of sad, wistful, look-what-that-bad-man-Lalit-Modi-has-done-to-our-game nostalgia. And yet they all ignore the glaring oversight that underpins their analysis: of course nobody’s going to score 100 first-class hundreds any more, everyone plays far too much one-day cricket. So why aren’t we counting one-day centuries?
It smacks of a simple, conservative snobbery - or what one might more accurately term ‘Frindallism’. It’s harder to score a century in one-day cricket, and it always has been; harder, at any rate, than milking sub-standard county attacks well into your fifties as most of the old-timers did. At the very least, one-day achievements should be as exalted in posterity as their first-class counterparts.
The next man to reach 100 centuries? Ricky Ponting, probably - he has 99 - but Justin Langer could still pip him: he has three to go, and up to ten matches to play for Somerset this season. And both, with respect, are greater batsmen than Les Ames.
Ramps? Oh, he did that ages ago. April 2007, to be precise, against Yorkshire. His current total is 114 centuries: 100 in first-class cricket, and 14 in one-day.
Writers and commentators have been quick to point out that Mark Ramprakash might be the last man to reach 100 hundreds. Usually they’ve done so in a tone of sad, wistful, look-what-that-bad-man-Lalit-Modi-has-done-to-our-game nostalgia. And yet they all ignore the glaring oversight that underpins their analysis: of course nobody’s going to score 100 first-class hundreds any more, everyone plays far too much one-day cricket. So why aren’t we counting one-day centuries?
It smacks of a simple, conservative snobbery - or what one might more accurately term ‘Frindallism’. It’s harder to score a century in one-day cricket, and it always has been; harder, at any rate, than milking sub-standard county attacks well into your fifties as most of the old-timers did. At the very least, one-day achievements should be as exalted in posterity as their first-class counterparts.
The next man to reach 100 centuries? Ricky Ponting, probably - he has 99 - but Justin Langer could still pip him: he has three to go, and up to ten matches to play for Somerset this season. And both, with respect, are greater batsmen than Les Ames.
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